Sly Crydel, Bugged in PotD?

[kryptix]

Long story short, I managed to beat Sly Crydel on PotD with a level 7 full party after about 2-3 hours of trying, but even then it felt very exploitative...

 

Party was:

Cipher (MC) fairly min maxed creation with max Might and Int and high Dex, very glass cannon only 4 Con.

Eder (Built as a pure defensive tank with the +1 engagement weapon)

Aloth (Has almost every level 4 and under spell, only level 3 spells I think at the time)

Durance

Kana

Hiravias

 

Here's the problem, the guy hits for 200-350!? I was pretty much in WTF mode when I saw that. My strategy ended up being using the little nook between two hills to the southeast of his camp as a choke point, and basically focus firing down the mage and priest while trying to land a lucky dominate on Crydel to kill everyone else. It would take pretty much a lucky 2-3 hits from Kana + Hiravias to kill the mage while my summoned animat/worms/skeletons and Eder kept everyone's attention. If Crydel managed to get to the front line that was an auto reload. After a whole bunch of retries I got the group down to Crydel + 2 melees because Crydel was able to 1-2 hit his friends while dominated.

 

Then I had to sacrifice a few people while the rest ran away using Kana's speed song and pray that the ones who died did not reagro after waking up resulting in perma death. This took about 20 tries.

 

To clean up the other enemies I equipped everyone with Arquebus/Arbalest and went in to basically one shot the guy while running away with speed song to deagro. After clearing his whole party and going to heal, I came back and kite Crydel around the whole map (this took another 5-6 tries) using speed song making sure he never caught up with me and one shot one of my characters. In the end, he would always start healing faster than I can damage him if I kept running away so it took several reloads in order to get enough hits to kill him from ~60% life which is as low as I could reliably get by kiting. I would rotate paralyze, slicken, and seal of repulsion while keeping up a tanglefoot in order to keep him locked from 60% to 0.

 

My question is, what kind of party could possibly take him on directly? I don't see how I would be able to build any character in this game to withstand a hit for 200 consistently even at level 12? The 200 damage was on a hit not even a crit, on Eder who is in exceptional quality full plate and has over 100 deflection. He'd hit almost every swing too. Is this actually designed so you can't face him with a regular tank?
 

None of the other Bounties I've faced so far were nearly as hard, and my Eder was able to tank Cail the dragon at level 8 with no issues...

 

Do I gain something by going further in the story to make this possible? I went and cleared every quest in Dyford and Cail etc. and Od Nua down to level 9 before going to Defiance Bay so I'm still in Act 2 if I might be missing something? I just don't see how the fight is possible without exploitative tactics and a cipher even with a custom rolled tank.